Help. My station is located in my business office. The office is located on the ground floor of a concrete block 2 story building that has no windows. My operating preferences are pretty much whatever my tech licenses priveledges are. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I know I'll get it because I always get good advice from you guys out there.

A 2M/440 mag mount on a filing cabinet connected to an HT would be an easy/quick start and would give you an idea of the viability of your location for indoor antennas that are more involved. Any aspirations for HF operating? What equipment do you have?

Your expectations should be tempered by the fact that the building will be your limiting factor, not any antenna. You won't know how/if it will work until you try something.

Have you considered operating portable from a local park? You would probably do better with a temporary portable antenna than an indoor antenna at your office. I would recommend building something like a segmented dipole for the bands of interest and erecting it as an inverted vee, either using a line over a tree as a center support or a 30 ft fiberglass mast such as the DK9SK, MFJ or Jackkite.

Here is a link to a typical segmented dipole design which can be modified to cover other bands. I build mine using spade lugs and alligator clips to connect the segments together.

Help. My station is located in my business office. The office is located on the ground floor of a concrete block 2 story building that has no windows. My operating preferences are pretty much whatever my tech licenses priveledges are. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I know I'll get it because I always get good advice from you guys out there.

That does complicate matters a bit, especially if the building has a metal roof.

Given the bands available on the HW-8, that means mostly 40m and 15m CW,possibly with 80m if we can squeeze in the antenna, but that isn't as likelyto be productive unless you are working at night.

The ideal thing would be to put an antenna on the roof and drop the coax downto your office. (Even better might be to run the antenna off the side of theroof to another support, so the wire is over the parking lot rather than theroof.) But those aren't always easy to accomplish.

If your building has a large metal roof like many other commercial buildings, thenputting a vertical antenna of some sort up there may work well. However you may not be able to contact the roof directly because it will be coated withsealant, and the building maintenance staff really doesn't like people puttingscrews through it. This takes some creativity.

I have worked with horizontal dipoles on top of such buildings with good results,but you might not find much in the way of a support that gets you more than10' above the roof. That's not too bad for local work on 80m and 40m (when thebands permit) but the feedpoint impedance may be low due to it being so closeto the metal roof. We fixed this in one case with a shunt coil connected acrossthe center insulator.

If you are limited to indoors, you may have trouble finding anything that willwork well. You can try various sorts of wires strung wherever you can to see how they work, but it will be heavily dependent on the interior configurationof the building. If the roof is metal then you may have best results tryingvertical polarization and/or placing the antenna as close to an outside wallas possible. If there is a large open assembly or shop area you may be ableto string up a dipole across the open space above the workers, but withoutmore information about what space is available to you we're really justshooting in the dark.

A word of caution, be careful with your power levels if you should transmit with an indoor antenna among office equipment. I keyed my 2 meter transceiver in my home office once with too much power and it instantly fried the circuitry in my battery backup. 73

If you can get any kind of signal out at all, my suggestion also would be to try a small, tuned vertical loop. They are easy to build. Here are two websites that provide all the information you will need:

Would the building engineer / owner allow you to erect something on the roof?? A dipole? Flat roof?And indoor antenna, ground floor, on HF is not going to do much.That's why there have been a lot of responses to go with 2M and up.

And may I comment that the magloop can be a great antenna indoors. 100W and your privileges should be good operating. And the magnetic loop will reduce local noise. But be aware of office equipment and RFI to and from these devices. They do not have to be FCC certified for interference as home equipment is supposed to be.Fred

Copyright 2000-2018 eHam.net, LLC
eHam.net is a community web site for amateur (ham) radio operators around the world.
Contact the site with comments or questions.
WEBMASTER@EHAM.NETSite Privacy Statement